IPC Releases Electronics Quality Survey

BANNOCKBURN, Ill. — IPC, formerly known as the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits, has released the results of its annual quality survey of electronics manufacturers. The survey, titled IPC Study of Quality Benchmarks for the Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) Industry 2014, is based on responses from 75 electronics manufacturers worldwide. The survey covered five broad areas: production, quality control, customer satisfaction, supplier performance, and certification data.

Because test, measurement, and inspection functions play a pivotal role in quantifying assembly quality, the report's section on quality control is filled with test processes such as:

Percentage of products utilizing electrical assembly test method

In-Circuit Test (ICT)

Manufacturing Defects Analyzer

Flying Probe

Boundary Scan

Average first-pass yield

Flying Probe

Boundary Scan

Percent of products utilizing automated optical inspection

Percent of products utilizing automated x-ray inspection

Percent of products that have final functional test

First pass yield at final functional test

Defect rate in defects per million opportunities at testing

Average yield at final inspection

Average first pass yield at final inspection

Defect rate in defects per million opportunities

The price of the report is $675 for IPC member companies and $1,350 for non-members. Companies that participated in the survey can receive copies at no cost.

I think IPC will take care of these as a part of the agreement being made before a companies participation. Otherwise on one will be willing to participate in these kind of surveys. Also IPC will have to rely on the data being provided by the participating companies, whatever the companies provide in terms of filling up the Data-Formats provided by IPC. One can find the Index of the report from IPC website, http://www.ipc.org/TOC/BENCHE-14.pdf, It seems to be below 100 page report.

The report of Electronics Quality Survey by IPC in not just covering the testing of PCBs, but it is a reports of EMS Electronics Manufacturing Services, that includes tests starting from material procurement till the final product after testing of it. This means a lot to those who are outsourcing their product manufacturing and assembling to these companies. To evaluate the performance of some EMS these reports mean a lot to the companies using their services.

That is a lot of money for firms to pay just to know who has a better quality in a market where price rules over anything else since at the end all these products are made by one vendor. Who thinks PCBs made by Sunstone for different clients under different logos can turn out anything useful. Price is ruling our industry now.

@Martin: Does IPC think about releasing this collected data of those 75 companies it carried out its inspections upon? If this happens then some companies would probably face the brunt of the leading market companies when such companies read the weaker companies? data. They would know what areas they lack in, and would try to suppress their market to acquire them or dissolve them.

IPC has left no stones unturned while gathering this data. They divided the collection into the 5 most probable categories and this gives better results. This will ensure the improvement of the companies with this data. I want to know how they collect Supplier data when they have to keep in account the rate of inflation in the market and the rate of black market goods influx into the market along the hands of trusted contractors.

@Martin: From the list of processes related to the PCB assembly testing I see that most of these are well known and being followed in production. Was there any new tests or methods described in the report? Are there any technological advancement related to the testing tools/fixtures suggested?